You may deploy academic jargon in your quotidian routines, but let’s take your praxis a step further. Which literary theoretical term do you embody?
Series
B-Sides: Iraj Pezeshkzad’s “My Uncle Napoleon”
In the central courtyard, in the middle of a family party, in mid-century Tehran, a fart rings out. Or was it a fart? A cat? A cat’s fart? The sound of a chair being ...
The Book That Made Me: An Animal
The Lives of Animals was the first book I read in college—or at least the first book I read in a strange, amazing seminar that rewired my brain in the first semester ...
On Our Nightstands: June 2019
At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is ...
Public Thinker: Adolph Reed Jr. on Organizing, Race, and Bernie Sanders
Growing up in a family of politically engaged black intellectuals in the ...
QUIZZICAL: Famous Writers, and Their Pets!
Behind many celebrated writers is a canine, feline, reptilian, or avian pal. Do you know the domestic creatures that have kept these novelists, playwrights, poets ...
The Rubble of Creation
This spring, I was enchanted by the story of mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck, awarded the Norwegian Abel Prize in 2019 for her work on bubbles, who at 76 still relishes the “technical obstacle,” “secrets,” and “mystery” of ...
Shoptalk: Overheard at ICA 2019
This year’s International Communication Association (ICA) conference officially took place in the Washington Hilton—or the Hinckley Hilton, as it is called by ...
B-Sides: J. R. Ackerley’s “We Think the World of You”
J. R. Ackerley’s We Think the World of You (1960) isn’t a novel I’d ever say I ...
Risky Choices: Women and Cabs in Hyderabad, India
The arrival of app-based ride-hailing in Indian cities has made a significant difference in the way the middle class, especially young men and women ...
Public Thinker: Louis Moore on Athlete-Activists before and after Kaepernick
In late 2016, amid the furor over Colin Kaepernick’s on-field protests against police brutality and rampant ...
Public Thinker: Kim Phillips-Fein on Austerity and the Fall of New York
With New York City teetering on the brink of fiscal collapse at the end of 1975, Congress passed ...
B-Sides: Edward P. Jones’s “All Aunt Hagar’s Children”
A Jones story can break just about every writing workshop edict in its handling ...
On Our Nightstands: April 2019
At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is ...
Public Thinker: Kathleen Belew on the Rise of “White Power”
Kathleen Belew is an international authority on the white-power movement ...
B-Sides: Russell Hoban’s “Riddley Walker”
Growing up, I knew and loved a string of books written by Russell and illustrated by Lillian Hoban. My sister and I read them—The Mole Family’s Christmas, The ...
Public Thinker: Thomas J. Sugrue on History’s Hard Lessons
From producing towering classics in the field of urban history to penning ...
On Our Nightstands: March 2019
At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is ...
The Afronaut Archives: Reports from a Future Zambia
“Most Westerners don’t even know whereabouts in Africa we are.” So said ...
Public Thinker: Jack Halberstam on Wildness, Anarchy, and Growing Up Punk
Defying disciplinary categorization, Halberstam’s work draws on ...
